All entries by this author
Apr 4th, 2018 4:38 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
This is just silly. Joe Pompeo at Vanity Fair on the woke young versus the [??] old at the NY Times the night Trump won the election:
Reporters and editors were in overdrive, tearing up one historic front page for another. The story that America’s paper of record had been gearing up to tell in the coming days—months, years—was being obliterated in real time. From a journalistic perspective, that wasn’t exactly a bad thing. The new story, after all, was more fascinating, more chaotic—utterly unprecedented. And Trump’s election was the kind of Earth-shattering event that only comes around once or twice in a newsperson’s career. So for someone like Dean Baquet, the Times’s then 60-year-old executive editor, the
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10 comments
Apr 4th, 2018 3:22 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Princess Ivanka and Prince Jared tried to get Planned Parenthood to stop providing abortion services in exchange for more $$$.
[Cecile] Richards, who is planning on stepping down as president [of PP] in 2018, reveals in her new book that the President’s daughter and son-in-law offered her an increase in federal funding for Planned Parenthood in exchange for its agreement to stop providing abortion services, according to People magazine.
“Jared and Ivanka were there for one reason: to deliver a political win,” Richards writes in “Make Trouble: Standing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding the Courage to Lead,” which was released Tuesday, People reported. “In their eyes, if they could stop Planned Parenthood from providing abortions, it would confirm their
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5 comments
Tags: Princess Ivanka
Apr 4th, 2018 12:39 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Madeleine Albright was on Fresh Air yesterday to talk about her new book: Fascism: A Warning and about the fascist trend.
Albright was the first woman secretary of state. She was appointed to that position by President Bill Clinton in 1997, after having served as his U.N. ambassador. Her new book examines how fascism took hold in Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. Then Albright moves on to look at current authoritarian leaders in several Eastern European countries, Turkey, Russia and North Korea. One chapter is devoted to President Trump, whose election, she says, added to her sense of urgency in writing this book. Albright is now a Distinguished Professor of Diplomacy at Georgetown University.
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MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: …And part of
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Apr 4th, 2018 11:53 am |
By Ophelia Benson
But to get the full flavor of Trump’s rudeness and mind-blindness you have to watch the video. He starts in a disciplined way, reading the speech with brief interjections of his own, and then after three minutes says thank you everybody, thank you (meaning, normally, “and good bye”)…and then lurching into a rant about China and “the trade deficit” and Mexico! and borders, with brief interjections where he looks directly at his guests and addresses them, as in “you wouldn’t understand this, you have great borders.” It’s obviously grotesquely inappropriate and protocol-violating – it’s a state visit occasion and he simply wrenches it into a diatribe on subjects that are of no interest to his state guests. This is … Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog
Tags: Trump
Apr 4th, 2018 11:25 am |
By Ophelia Benson
The Post gives us a bit of slapstick from yesterday, when Trump threw a lunch party for the presidents of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and spent most of it telling reporters how grumpy he is about
a
long
list
of
things.
President Trump spent nearly three minutes at a luncheon this week welcoming the presidents of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — whose difficult-to-pronounce names he never uttered publicly — and saying he should be given “credit” for pressuring countries like theirs to give more money to NATO.
As he concluded, White House staffers started to shepherd a small group of journalists out of the room — but Trump was far from done sharing his complaints. As reporters shouted out questions
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2 comments
Tags: Trump
Apr 3rd, 2018 5:29 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
A little vignette of what it’s like to play at Being the Government with Trump in the room – a slice from a longer piece about ogod ogod it’s chaos he’s so nuts he blows off everything anyone suggests to him ogod ogod.
And now, the little vignette:
Aides often become frustrated with the President’s short attention span. One official described Trump as frequently meandering from the topic at hand in meetings, particularly if he believes the positions being aired by his advisers differ from his own point of view. He’ll stall sessions with non-sequiturs, complaining at random about Amazon’s tax status or proclaiming that he’s only visited Russia once, for the Miss Universe pageant in 2013.
We all know … Read the rest
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4 comments
Apr 3rd, 2018 4:27 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
In Mueller news – he does have the authority to investigate the things he’s investigating.
Paul Manafort’s legal strategy for evading the charges filed against him by special counsel Robert Mueller was fairly straightforward. His attorneys argued, among other things, that many of the charges Manafort faces — which include fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy — are largely outside the scope of Mueller’s authority. After all, Mueller was appointed to investigate collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign during the 2016 race. What does Manafort’s allegedly having laundered money by buying real estate in Brooklyn have to do with any of that?
Trump fans have been saying that, noisily all along. Problem: it’s not true.
Late Monday night, Mueller’s team
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3 comments
Apr 3rd, 2018 11:06 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Now he wants to get the military involved in his war on immigrants.
President Trump said on Tuesday that he planned to order the military to guard parts of the southern border until he can build a wall and tighten immigration restrictions, proposing a remarkable escalation of his efforts to crack down on migrants entering the country illegally.
Mr. Trump, who has been stewing publicly for days about what he characterizes as lax immigration laws and the potential for an influx of Central American migrants to stream into the United States, said he had been discussing with Jim Mattis, the secretary of defense, about resorting to military deployments.
“We have very bad laws for our border, and we are going
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5 comments
Tags: Trump
Apr 3rd, 2018 10:33 am |
By Ophelia Benson
It’s entirely completely and utterly coincidental that Scott Pruitt got a sweet deal on a condo from a lobbyist and it just so happened that at the very same time the lobbyists client got a sweet deal from the EPA. There is NO CONNECTION WHATEVER and it’s very rude to say otherwise. People have such awful corrupt minds, you know? Seeing a connection where there is none.
The Environmental Protection Agency signed off last March on a Canadian energy company’s pipeline-expansion plan at the same time that the E.P.A. chief, Scott Pruitt, was renting a condominium linked to the energy company’s powerful Washington lobbying firm.
Both the E.P.A. and the lobbying firm dispute that there was any connection between
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2 comments
Tags: Corruption, Sleaze
Apr 3rd, 2018 10:14 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Learn something new every day. Today-I-learned that Sinclair has employment contracts that say employees have to pay Sinclair MUCH MONEY if they quit or are fired. That sounds illegal to me, but apparently it’s not.
https://twitter.com/mattdpearce/status/980811757726810112
If you can’t read the screenshot – it basically just says “employees have to pay Sinclair MUCH MONEY if they quit or are fired” in more legalese and detail.
That helps explain why they can’t just say “No” when Sinclair tells them to read lying canned bullshit on camera.… Read the rest
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7 comments
Apr 3rd, 2018 9:35 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Remember how last week, to the surprise of all, Trump joined the UK and other allies in expelling Russian diplomats?
He was just kidding. Russia can totally send new ones to replace the expellees.
Julian Borger is the Guardian’s world affairs editor.
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2 comments
Tags: Trump
Apr 3rd, 2018 9:21 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Taslima asks a pointed question.
I have to say, I’m a little grossed out by all those shameless naked hands poking out. They’re obviously doing it on purpose – carefully pushing their naked nude unclad hands out front so that we can’t not see them. The sluts.… Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
3 comments
Apr 2nd, 2018 5:39 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Oh, damn, this is heartbreaking and infuriating. Jill McCabe on why she decided to accept the urging to run for state office, and how badly that turned out for them.
I am an emergency room pediatrician and an accidental politician — someone who never thought much about politics until I was recruited to run for state office after making a statement about the importance of expanding Medicaid. That decision — plus some twisted reporting and presidential tweets — ended up costing my husband, Andrew, his job and our family a significant portion of his pension my husband had worked hard for over 21 years of federal service. For the past year and a half of this nightmare, I have
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6 comments
Tags: Andrew McCabe, Jill McCabe
Apr 2nd, 2018 3:37 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Suzanne Moore has a lot of sympathy for Niall Ferguson and other endangered guys like him.
Up steps the latest victim, poor Niall Ferguson, author, history professor and lover of empire, who wrote in the Sunday Times that he had to endure a “disproportionately vitriolic response” for organising a conference that featured only white male historians. How he has suffered, I can only imagine.
Jordan Peterson, another minor academic, became major simply by outlining how wrong we are to talk of the various ways in which western culture has been deemed oppressive to women. Excuse me, but didn’t Camille Paglia do that 20 years ago?
To such men, any notion of inclusiveness, or of the dread “diversity”, becomes a
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Apr 2nd, 2018 3:08 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Trump and Pruitt are putting their shoulders to the wheel, or their feet to the floor, pushing us to create more and more and more pollution to make American great again.
The Trump administration openly threatened one of the cornerstones of California’s environmental protections Monday, saying that it may revoke the state’s ability under the Clean Air Act to impose stricter standards than the federal government sets for vehicle emissions.
The announcement came as the administration confirmed it is tearing up landmark fuel economy rules pushing automakers to manufacture cleaner burning cars and SUVs.
We want dirtier burning cars, god damn it. Dirt is good. It’s like cowboys n shit.
Pruitt’s announcement said that the administration will abandon the federal
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4 comments
Apr 2nd, 2018 11:23 am |
By Ophelia Benson
Class photo time again: Trump with the spring class of White House interns:
That’s nearly 100 people; I think I found four who are not white.
Also, how weird is it that all the women have the Trump-women look? The long hair worn down over the shoulders in front in the manner of Princess Ivanka – every single female person in the photo is wearing her hair that way. As a female person who had long hair in her youth I can tell you that’s not a natural or default way to wear long hair; the natural thing is to pull it all back out of the way and just leave it there. It’s weird to drape some of … Read the rest
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16 comments
Apr 2nd, 2018 9:46 am |
By Ophelia Benson
What happens when you let your attention wander for a minute and you elect a toddler to be chief executive of a country with a huge nuclear arsenal:
When Donald Trump was elected president, it quickly became obvious that the traditional national-security briefing a person in his position receives daily would be well beyond his zone of proximal development. The briefings were slimmed down in length, chopped up into easy-to-digest bullet points, and decorated with lots of graphs and pictures. Alas, the Washington Post reports, even the kiddie version of the presidential brief has proven too challenging. Now, Trump gets his briefing verbally.
Michael Wolf is very clear on this in Fire and Fury: Trump won’t read and … Read the rest
Posted in Notes and Comment Blog |
8 comments
Tags: Trump
Apr 1st, 2018 5:29 pm |
By Ophelia Benson
Here is Leo Igwe’s talk at a TED conference.
As a humanist, Leo Igwe doesn’t believe in divine intervention — but he does believe in the power of human beings to alleviate suffering, cure disease, preserve the planet and turn situations of poverty into prosperity. In this bold talk, Igwe shares how humanism can free Africans from damaging superstitions and give them the power to rebuild the continent.
This talk was presented at an official TED conference, and was featured by our editors on the home page.
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